FRANCE 2 – MONDAY, JANUARY 31 AT 9:10 P.M. – FILM
We will glimpse fleetingly, at the beginning of these Elementary particles, a public service television version of Michel Houellebecq’s novel published in 1998, A Herd of Cows in the Irish Countryside. Two-tone animals, harmless, except that they are all identical. The effect is barely stated, the idea of a universe populated by “replicants” – one of the essential fantasies of the book – barely sketched.
Discretion is the charm of this third adaptation of the novel
This discretion is the charm of this third adaptation of the novel (after the feature film by Oskar Roehler in 2006 and the staging by Julien Gosselin presented in Avignon in 2013), which blurs what used to be the weight of the text, benefit of its central duo, the half-brothers Michel Djerzinski (Ferdinand Redouloux then Jean-Charles Clichet) and Bruno Clément (Milan Cerisier then Guillaume Gouix) whose complaints harmonize for thirty years (from 1968 to 1998) in a kind of requiem in memory of the male condition.
These two large quarters of life are cut into thin slices by Gilles Taurand’s screenplay, which alternates eras and characters, repeating the brutal and significant oppositions of the text until they become rehashed, thus leaving Michel and Bruno, and their interpreters, enough space to exist as characters, which is better than being reduced to the state of signs.
Satire and cartoon
For the record: Michel Djerzinski (who borrows his surname from one of the founders of the Cheka and the Soviet prison system) and Bruno Clément are from the same unworthy mother, wealthy and liberated hippie, Janine Luciani (Pascale Arbillot) and both brought up by virtuous ancestors (also on screen, the women of Elementary particles exist only to make men suffer, until they approach their last hour).
While Michel grows freed from all libido, obsessively devoting himself to his scientific career, which leads him to take an interest in cloning, Bruno succumbs to a sex addiction which just as surely bars his way to love and fulfillment. that his brother’s anhedonia condemns him to solitude. The caricatures that surround them (the cool stepmother, the very “glorious thirty” stepfather played by Patrick Mille) bring out their misfortune better.
Bruno can no longer be himself, and the actor Guillaume Gouix details with an almost unbearable thoroughness this disgust
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